Anneke van Baalen, HIDDEN MASCULINITY, Max Weber's historical sociology of bureaucracy,
Amsterdam 1994, dissertation University of Amsterdam INTRODUCTION
7
between 'men' and 'not-men' - are not logical at all: they are full of 'paradoxes', 'inversions of
meaning' and 'fluent transitions between opposites'.
These conceptual manipulations enable him to speculate on the history of 'irrational' social
formations by constructing conceptual developments in a reverse way. He first projects
modern phenomena - the domination of the father in the family of his time and the
compelling powers of the extraordinary person - back into history as respectively 'traditional'
and 'charismatic' 'domination', and then develops these concepts in such a way that known
historical phenomena - like 'patriarchy' or 'knighthood' - can be defined by them.
His speculations on the 'origins' of institutions which are described in written history or
'ethnology' therefore are hidden in conceptual manipulations. Moreover, since the concept
'rationality' is a static one - 'rationalization' indicating only changes in what is being
'rationalized' - his search for the origins of 'rationality' also is to be found in the development
of 'irrational' social forms and in the conceptual manipulations needed to establish
connections between 'irrational' and 'rational' formations, which are also formulated with the
help of 'contradictions' and 'fluent transitions between opposites'.
For a better understanding of Weber's method and of the contents of his sociology I will
analyze his private values as he represented them explicitly in his political writings and
implicitly in his method and his sociology, and even more implicitly in the values which his
wife, Marianne Weber-Schnitger, proclaimed in 'Ehefrau und Mutter in der
Rechtsentwicklung', on which he cooperated.
If the overt and convert workings of Weber's mind, as they appear from his writings, have
been clarified, the historical knowledge which is transferred in Weber's sociology has to be
translated in rational terms. This can be done because Weber does not only constructs
modern concepts to understand historical relations, but also derives concepts from historical
relations. These historical concepts connect his otherwise separate constructions of the
economic, social, religious, political, juridical and military spheres to each other.
The concepts of 'office' and 'household' are such historical concepts. In his attempts to
understand the history of 'rationality' itself, Weber analyzed a disintegration process of 'the
bourgeois household', caused by the growing money economy, in which 'the office' was
separated from it; in this way he located the separation of public and private spheres in
historical reality. Following Marx' and Freud's theories on the connections between being
and consciousness, I presume that the effects of the growing money economy did not only
separate 'private' relations from 'public' ones, but that bourgeois consciousness was split in a
'private' and a 'public' sphere as well. A contradiction developed between the official world of
men, which increasingly was ruled by principles of freedom and equality, and the household
world of women, which remained defined by patriarchal domination. Since both worlds were
only connected by patriarchal relations, the official world took precedence over the private
one; the patriarchal relations which connect both worlds and dominate household relations
were increasingly repressed from consciousness and therefore only represented in
'irrational' or 'ideological' - indirect, transformed and inverted - ways.
In 'official' theory therefore only 'official' relations between men were represented;
'household' relations were conceptualized as irrational 'tradition' and even as 'nature' - as
defined by 'passions', 'drives', 'instincts' or 'genes' - and therefore as being outside of the
reach of rational masculine knowledge. Knowledge of the private sphere becomes 'women's
knowledge', which is only of interest for men if it is transformed into - irrational - art.
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